... "there is no life on the internet ... no sense of space in cyberspace" ...

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This group was created to encourage participation in educational and cultural events in the Greater Cambridge area and occasionally further afield. All events are open to attendance by anyone. Visitors to this site, whether they choose to join the CMF or not, may attend any event. Members may RSVP or not, and still attend events. There are no requirements for membership or attendance. Members do, however, receive event reminders - and members are encouraged to actually meet up!

CMF Meet-Ups are member-driven, so if you want to meet other members, it is up to you, as a member, to post your plans on the event message board. This can be somewhat empowering since anyone, by simply posting their own plans for an event, can become the de-facto, ad-hoc organizer for that event. Just do it! (as used to be said) ... then again, if no one posts plans, no one meets up ... (though that's OK too) ...

Please note that "Featured Events" are not in chronological order ... (other events listed further down may be happening at an earlier date).

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The Cambridge Moveable Feast generally focuses on the more traditional, classical and scholarly educational and cultural opportunities rather than pop, abstract, postmodernist or techno-culture.

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Note: If you have a question that doesn't affect the rest of the group, please email me directly using the link to the left. Everyone else gets enough email as it is. Thanks.

Further Note: Occasionally, events are cancelled by the event sponsor. Should an event be cancelled, it will be removed from the calendar. However, the CMF is not always notified of cancellations. Please confirm, prior to attending, the time and location of the event from the event sponsor.

Also: Some events require pre-registration through the event sponsor. A "Yes" RSVP here is NOT pre-registration. Attendees must still pre-register individually through the event sponsor. Usually there will be a link to the event sponsor's website for pre-registration.

One more thing: CMF protocol suggests that members only wear official CMF sleeveless tee-shirts when it is appropriate to the venue and the event. The preferred method of fabrication is to cut the sleeves off of a regular tee-shirt and hand-print the CMF acronym, somewhat legibly, on either the front or back of the shirt (or both, as you wish) with an indelible marking pen. Members who submit selfies featuring official CMF sleeveless tee-shirts will receive two complimentary CMF pin-on buttons ... (and will also qualify to learn the secret CMF handshake).

The Cambridge Moveable Feast has no political, commercial, academic or spiritual affiliations of any kind.

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"Men (sic) have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their own minds all the material which they employed, but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have the facts and not opinions to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world." - Francis Bacon

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"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." - John W. Gardner

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“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” - Robert Heinlein

Note: The Cambridge Moveable Feast, while appreciative of Robert Heinlein's supposition, takes a somewhat different, if more basic, approach as to what human beings (as he writes) "should be able to (do)" - that (ideally) everyone should have some direct involvement in meeting their dietary needs (hunt, gather, garden, cook - whatever); they should be able to make (craft) something useful (work with their hands); they should appreciate the value of personal boundaries (hence the CMF focus on boxing); they should value their place (whatever it may be) in the evolution of the species (this relates to gender and sexuality and has virtually no limitations); and they should be able to express themselves in some manner that has the potential to rise to the level of art. That pretty much covers it.

It should be noted that every human activity (as well as all of academia) can be traced back to one, or a combination of these five evolution-driven activities. They represent, in microcosm, the philosophy of both the Cambridge Moveable Feast and the Sequitorian Society and are the only complete blueprint for self-actualization. Feedback welcome. - §

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"I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives, the disastrous byproduct of the scientific and technical mentality." - Albert Einstein ... (and that was almost a hundred years ago! - §)

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E. H. is simply a point of reference for this group, as well as the source of our name: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a Moveable Feast" (E. H.) ... ... as is Cambridge. - §

A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs by American author Ernest Hemingway, anecdotes of Hemingway's years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920's. Prominent people appearing in the book include Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. A Moveable Feast was edited by Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary, and published posthumously in 1964. Some of the cafes, bars, and hotels mentioned in the book can still be found in Paris today.

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut the scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written." - Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast

Note: The Cambridge Moveable Feast encourages members to work rigorously on the art of writing (and speaking) in true sentences ... (and little else) ...

The Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le Déjeuner des Canotiers - 1881) is a painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, now in The Phillips Collection Museum in Washington, D.C. It depicts a few of Renoir's friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise along the Seine river in Chatou, France.

The painting represents a mix of people, ranging from the top-hatted, formally-dressed folks in the background to the more casually outfitted fellows in the foreground (in boating attire), who sometimes find themselves brought together by a common interest, as is so often the case in Cambridge. It has been modified (with apologies to the art-world) by this group's organizer with the addition of a few Hemingwayesque elements to make it more representative of this group.

The Cambridge Moveable Feast is a Sequitorian Enterprise ... § ... from the root to the fruit (SDO).

Afterthought: Life is interesting enough, Ernie, without having to make things up. - §

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And finally ... If you find that the internet, news & entertainment media, professional sports and other spectacles, in conjunction with everything else available via the global communications infrastructure, are more compelling than those things in your immediate surroundings which you can access directly through your five senses ... that’s a problem - §